The city-state (polis) is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental aspects of Greek history. John Ma’s book is a monumental study of the history of the Greek polis in the very long term.Footnote ¹ It starts from the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces around 1200 bce and takes the story to the end of ancient poleis around 600 ce; alongside the immense temporal extent, Ma impressively covers the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean. In my view, this is unquestionably the most significant contribution to the study of Greek history over the last two decades. It is the first attempt to focus the history of the polis not on the archaic and classical periods, but on the Hellenistic and early imperial poleis. The reason for this, and the most significant contribution of the book, is Ma’s concept of the ‘great convergence’: the spread across the eastern Mediterranean between 400–200 bce of a democratic model of the polis based on citizen equality, assemblies, the provision of public goods, and the disappearance of older models based on oligarchy and characterized by disenfranchised citizens, subject communities, and serf populations. At the same time, the dominance of large-scale geopolitical actors such as the Hellenistic kingdoms and later Rome put an end to the ‘Hundred Years War’ between 450–350 (another important conceptual innovation), in which dominant poleis tried to subjugate and conquer other poleis; after 350 bce, poleis’ attempts at expansion usually incorporated smaller communities on equal terms. The book is structured around the great convergence: earlier chapters examine the diverse world of the poleis before the convergence, while later chapters explore the transformation of the polis and its employment by the Roman Empire, once the Mediterranean stopped being a multipolar world. This very rich book functions both as an excellent survey of numerous Greek communities, as well as an impressive synthesis offering a new periodization of Greek history. It will undoubtedly generate major new debates among Greek historians, which are urgently needed in our field.

Ma’s volume must be read alongside The Oxford Handbook of Greek Cities in the Roman Empire, edited by Martin Hallmannsecker and Anna Heller.Footnote ² This excellent handbook offers specialists and interested readers a much-needed overview of Greek history in the late republican and early imperial periods, again refracted through the concept of the city. It concerns a period of Greek history whose study until very recently was characterized by a huge amount of detailed case studies and little synthetic work. This rich volume offers a fascinating overview of past scholarship and current trends which will hopefully constitute a turning point, both in the study of the period, but also in enabling a reconceptualization of Greek history at large, along the lines envisaged by Ma. The volume is divided into six sections. The first focuses on the nature of the evidence for the early imperial period; the second examines civic institutions (polis status, citizenship, age groups, civic subdivisions, deliberative institutions, and magistracies); the third turns to local political practices, the maintenance of order and the management of conflicts, and geopolitical relations; the impressive fourth section explores the nature of Greek civic societies in the early imperial period (social hierarchies, the countryside, slavery, associations, gender, necropoleis); the fifth examines cults and education; finally, the long sixth section offers synthetic case studies, largely focused on the Aegean and Asia Minor, but also with contributions from the Black Sea, Sicily, Syria, Cyrenaica, and Egypt.

I continue with two other books which explore different aspects of the history of Greek poleis. Roy van Wijk’s book examines interstate relations between Athens and Boiotia in the archaic and classical periods.Footnote ³ Most studies tend to focus on particular cities, or more rarely regions; the importance of this study is that it focuses on relations between two distinct but neighbouring regions. Traditional approaches to relations between Athens and Boiotia have focused on enmity and conflict; van Wijk argues against this assumption and the realist approach to international relations on which it is based. He attempts to create an alternative non-realist framework, that focuses on factors such as reciprocity, justice, kinship, and reputation; while there is undoubtedly some need to balance the earlier perspective, in my opinion van Wijk tends to bend the stick too much in the opposite direction. Be that as it may, the book offers an exhaustive investigation of the diplomatic and military exchanges between Athens and Boiotia, which will be a port of call for any future studies. Undoubtedly, though, the most significant part of the book is its excellent discussion of the borderlands between Athens and Boiotia, which should act as a model for the study of other Greek borderlands. Finally, readers will find equally interesting the discussion of the social memory of Athenian–Boeotian relations as reflected in Panhellenic and local sanctuaries.

The above book is complemented by the volume edited by Sheila Ager and Hans Beck on localism in Hellenistic Greece.Footnote ⁴ Regional, trans-regional, and global approaches have made a big impact on the study of Greek history over the last two decades, in part as a reaction to the dominance of the polis as a self-enclosed entity. This volume aims to emphasize the continuing significance of the local, even in the substantially extended horizons of the Hellenistic world. The fifteen chapters focus on central Greece and the Peloponnese, but also cover Sicily and Asia Minor. This is undoubtedly a very important issue, which needs further study. But although all chapters are useful case studies of e.g. the Spartan context of Cleomenes III’s Argive campaigns, or the local horizons of the Thessalian Eleutheria, the argument that there are always local contexts does not get scholarship very far. It is telling that a volume on Greek localism largely eschews the sea – although this would have provided a stimulating means of thinking through the entanglement of local and global. Contributors would have also benefited immensely from a modicum of engagement with how historians in other fields have tried to deal with the issue of localism.Footnote ⁵ Finally, with few exceptions (e.g. Funke’s chapter on how localism was redefined in the context of the expansion of the Aetolian league), there is little sense of how localism operated in the context of the Hellenistic period in ways that were different from e.g. the archaic or the early imperial period.

I move on to three books on ancient military history. Two of them are very important contributions to a little-studied issue: the deep interconnection between military and economic history. The first is the volume edited by Roel Konijnendijk and Manu Dal Borgo on the economics of war in ancient Greece.Footnote ⁶ The traditional agonal model of archaic and classical Greek warfare posited a very static picture of the relationship between the two factors. But new approaches to ancient economies and the emergence of ‘wealthy Greece’ necessitate a change of perspective. Greek warfare was precisely affected by the hugely increased resources available to Greek communities, and aspects that were interpreted through the primitivist perspective can now be approached in very different ways. This has profound implications which will take time to fully sort through. At the same time, Greek warfare became ever more reliant on financial expertise that states needed to pool the resources they required, while logistics became fundamental. The contributions to the volume explore the emergence and circulation of financial expertise and the evolution of Greek logistics. This is an extremely important and very fertile volume, which must be read extensively and with attention.

Charlotte van Regenmortel’s book concerns the link between mercenary soldiers, wage labour, and the Hellenistic economies.Footnote ⁷ The study of Hellenistic mercenaries has a very long pedigree; the same cannot be said about wage labour in antiquity. It was long assumed that wage labour was a marginal phenomenon, overshadowed by the dominance of slavery and self-employed producers. Van Regenmortel rightly insists that not every form of payment constitutes wage labour – thus insisting on the significance of labour markets. She argues that the significance of wage labour increased substantially from the Hellenistic period onwards; the mass increase in demand for soldiers from the competition between Hellenistic kingdoms led to a major increase in the scope for wage labour. These developments did not emerge for the first time in the Hellenistic period; as the author shows, classical navies constituted an earlier form of this phenomenon. But the competition between the wealthy Successor states and their lack of conscription as a possibility of recruitment increased massively the labour market for soldiers. In its turn, the mass increase in wage labour had a significant impact on Hellenistic economies, affecting other markets as well and furthering monetization.

The third volume, edited by Hannah-Marie Chidwick, focuses on the body of the combatant in the ancient Mediterranean.Footnote ⁸ The experience of the various bodies which were involved in ancient warfare constituted a crucial aspect of military history, which has so far received less attention than other military aspects. The nine chapters in the volume examine three major aspects of the role of the body in warfare. The first concerns how war affected the bodies of the combatants in the battlefield; I single out the bioarchaeological study of the bodies of Roman soldiers in Britain. The second aspect concerns the role of the body in the formation of the military identities of battle combatants; particularly stimulating are the two chapters on the dress and identities of Parthian horsemen and Dalmatian warriors. Finally, the third aspect concerns the role of bodies post-combat, including the depiction of bodies in war memorials and the medical practices aimed at restoring and assisting the injured bodies of warriors. While most discussion concerns the bodies of male warriors, two chapters focus on female bodies, either in the rare case of female warriors, or in the post-battle phase that affected captured, slain, and violated women.

This brings us to two very important volumes that focus on issues of ancient health. There are numerous volumes devoted to scientific medicine or to ancient illnesses and epidemics; William Harris’s latest book is a remarkable synthesis of the social history of healthcare in classical antiquity.Footnote ⁹ At the core of this book is the fact that scientific medicine, and its theories and practitioners, constituted only a limited part of ancient healthcare; the latter also included lay theories and practices, which could often paradoxically identify phenomena that scientific medicine refused to recognize, such as that of contagion; finally, religious practices co-existed and interpenetrated with both lay and scientific medicine. The book is meandering, but it largely consists of three major fields. The first examines the different aspects of health and disease, which often called for very different approaches to healthcare: the volume focuses in particular on pain and analgesics, abortion and mental disorders. The second focuses on practitioners and means of healthcare; apart from doctors and lay practitioners, the book includes three excellent chapters on seers, amulets, and ancient hospitals. Finally, the third main issue concerns scientific, lay, and religious attitudes. The lack of a clear structure will make it highly likely that most readers will only consult the volume for particular issues; but the wealth of material brought to discussion, and the deep knowledge of ancient social history by the author, will certainly repay a careful cover-to-cover reading.

Anna Lagia and Sofia Voutsaki have edited an important volume on the use of bioarchaeology and the evidence it provides on health and diet, as a source to study social inequality and difference in the ancient Greek world.Footnote ¹⁰ While the bulk of bioarcheological studies of antiquity concern the Bronze Age and the Roman world, by now there is a substantial body of studies that Greek historians can and should no longer ignore. But successful employment of this evidence requires that ancient historians without bioarchaeological training are able to understand the nature of the evidence and how it can be employed to answer historical questions. The volume does an excellent job in opening such a dialogue. A number of essays explain how the bioarchaeological evidence concerning health, sickness, and diet can illuminate questions of inequality and difference and how isotope and DNA analysis can be employed to analyse the evidence. These methodological chapters are accompanied by fascinating case studies ranging from archaic Sicily to Roman Greece; undoubtedly the notorious case of the Phaleron cemetery will generate major attention. These case studies explore issues of age in Megara Hyblaia, ethnicity in Greek colonial contexts, social status in Athens, and kinship in Boeotia. The volume is concluded by two responses from a historian and a bioarchaeologist respectively, who tease out the wider implications of the volume.

I move on to an excellent cultural history of ancient sport, edited by Paul Christesen and Charles Stocking.Footnote ¹¹ The volume includes both Greek and Roman sport, and accordingly squarely faces a very important difference. Greek sport was a mass activity that included a very significant section of Greek societies; participation in athletic activities constituted a means of self-incorporation in ancient elites for practitioners. While Greek sport was also a spectacle, the latter aspect was dominant in Roman sport; the elite role of Roman sport concerned the providers of spectacle, as well as the role of venues in creating social hierarchies and a sense of community. The significance of this major difference should invite more work about the differences between Greek and Roman societies. These major reflections are explored in detail in various chapters that examine athletic festivals and venues; training, the use of technology, and the goods employed both in practising and as rewards; the emergence of rules and arbiters and their changing history; the significance of athletics for other aspects of Greek and Roman societies; and the role of the athletic body in the history of ancient art. I found equally important the attention paid to temporal change and spatial diversity, in particular to Greek sport in the wider Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and early imperial periods. My only complaint is that the cultural history of Roman professional sport practitioners gets relatively short shrift – but there are plenty of alternatives for the interested reader. All in all, this is a brilliant introduction to the cultural history of ancient sport.

Irad Malkin and Josine Blok have made a significant contribution to the study of ancient Greek anthropology.Footnote ¹² Their book offers a rich panorama on the social, political, cultural, and economic significance of the lot in ancient Greek societies. The centrality of the lot in the Greek world has been little explored so far, with prior work largely focused on the lot in Athenian democracy. But as Malkin and Blok demonstrate, the lot expresses a mindset with deep roots in Greek culture. These roots were not the religious expression of divine will, as is often assumed, notwithstanding the relatively minor importance of Greek divination by lot. Rather, the lot expressed the egalitarian perception of most Greek social groups. Whether distributive, selective, procedural, or mixing, lots were employed to achieve equal sharing among their members; the authors examine the use of the lot to distribute sacrificial meat, inheritances, and land lots in the innumerable new settlements from the archaic period onwards. Building on this widely shared mindset across the Greek world, they examine its transformation into an ideology linked to democracy, focusing in particular on classical Athens. This is an important argument for the constitutive role of egalitarianism in Greek social history in the very long term; and it raises the important question of how exactly it was balanced by the significant penchant for hierarchy that is manifested in the Greek world from very early on as well.

David Pritchard has edited a volume focused on the Athenian funeral oration.Footnote ¹³ This work aims to reassess the path-breaking book devoted to the subject by Nicole Loraux, originally published in 1981.Footnote ¹⁴ Loraux attempted to define the main features of the genre, while also famously arguing that the funeral speech presented democracy in largely aristocratic terms. This volume builds on Loraux’s contribution to the study of Athenian public ideology, while also reassessing her arguments and providing new contexts and perspectives. The book includes a detailed introduction by the editor, alongside an exploration of Loraux’s intellectual background. One important correction is to examine the individual surviving speeches on their own, pointing out their specific features which challenge the wider genre features that Loraux attempted to delineate. A second important corrective concerns the examination of intertextual relations with other genres of Athenian public ideology, in particular assembly speeches, law-court speeches, tragedy, and comedy; the relationship between funeral orations and the actual funerary practices and representations in contemporary Athens is equally illuminating. Finally, the most fascinating part, in my view, is the attempt to qualify and partly invalidate Loraux’s claim that there was no Athenian democratic ideology, by examining aspects of Athenian democratic ideology ignored by Loraux and offering new interpretations of why funeral orations present other democratic elements in the way they do.

Daniel Ogden has edited a very important Companion to Alexander the Great.Footnote ¹⁵ The thirty chapters in the volume do an excellent job of helping readers navigate the main contours of the complex evidence, the major topics, and the direction of past and present scholarship. The volume examines four large issues. The first focuses on Alexander’s life and career, with a fascinating chapter on the purposes of Alexander’s campaign and illuminating discussions of Macedonia, Egypt, Persia, and India. The second concerns the various contexts of Alexander’s career: kingship and court, the army, finance and administration, religion, and the knowledge generated by Alexander’s campaigns. The third examines the diverse images of Alexander presented by the main sources (Arrian, Plutarch, Curtius, and the fragmentarily preserved sources); given the nature of the Alexander tradition, these chapters offer an excellent introduction that will be most useful to non-specialist readers. Finally, the fourth explores Alexander’s ancient reception by the Successors and Roman emperors, and among diverse audiences, including the Alexander Romance and Jewish and early Christian literature, as well as ancient art.

The above book brings us to four important works on Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. The first two books focus on the Greek and Jewish diasporas in Hellenistic Egypt and their consequences. The volume edited by Lucio del Corso and Antonio Ricciardetto examines Greek culture in Hellenistic Egypt.Footnote ¹⁶ The book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on archaeology and material culture; on the one hand it examines the entanglement of Greek and Egyptian features in Ptolematic portraiture, while two excellent chapters examine the material repercussions of Greek colonization in the Fayum area. The second part turns our attention to documentary evidence, the distinction between Greek and Egyptian identities, the ways in which these are recorded in diverse documents, and the ways in which people from one tradition employ documents written in the other language and documentary tradition. In my view, alongside the archaeological evidence of the first part, the most fascinating is the third part, which focuses on how literary papyri can inform us about the introduction and impact of Greek culture on Hellenistic Egypt. Alongside chapters on new and old comedy and historiography, the two chapters on early Greek medical papyri are particularly interesting, given also the important book by Harris reviewed above. But they vie for primacy with an excellent final chapter that excavates Greek musical and literary culture as represented in the massive archive of Zenon.

Zsuzsanna Szántó’s synthesis focuses on the Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt.Footnote ¹⁷ The book examines the development of this Hellenistic Jewish diaspora in the various settlements of Egypt, taking into account both the antecedents of Jewish presence in Egypt in previous periods, as well as the new circumstances of the Hellenistic period. Szántó examines the role of Jews in the Ptolemaic army, police, and bureaucracy, as well as their economic roles in banking, agriculture, commerce, and crafts. Particularly interesting is the examination of Jewish identity and practice in the Egyptian setting: onomastic practices and trends, the relation between Jewish religious practices concerning financial affairs and marriage and the actual practices of Ptolemaic Jews as reflected in their legal documents, and, finally, the practice of Jewish religion in Egypt and the emergence of the first synagogues. As the author shows, the diaspora experience of Egyptian Jews included diverse elements: their Judaean traditions, the impact of Hellenism in the Ptolemaic kingdom, and the significance of the Egyptian religious and cultural setting.

The last two books on Egypt aim to redress various major imbalances. The volume edited by Katherine Blouin focuses on the Nile Delta.Footnote ¹⁸ Egypt is still commonly marginalized in the study of antiquity, due to the widespread assumption that its supposed peculiar character makes its evidence unrepresentative; and within Egyptian studies, the Nile Delta is marginalized in its turn in comparison with the main focus on the Nile valley. This volume aims to redress this marginalization by means of two important strategies. The first is explicit attention to the ancient, medieval, and modern discourses concerning the Delta and the ways in which they have affected modern scholarship. The second is through an emphasis on the long term, from the pre-dynastic period all the way to the twentieth century, which aims to put into perspective the usual focus of classical scholars on the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As a result, while most of the eighteen chapters focus on earlier and later periods, their implications for the Hellenistic and imperial periods are profound. Particularly interesting in this respect is the chapter on the Delta in the Persian period, which puts the Ptolemaic developments into proper perspective, as well as the chapter examining the long-term impact of wine production in the Mareotis area before the creation of Alexandria.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ book aims to redress another imbalance: the isolation of the last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII.Footnote ¹⁹ Cleopatra is notorious, both in the ancient sources and in modern popular culture, and is considered an exceptional figure; but as Llewellyn-Jones demonstrates, to properly understand the famous Cleopatra we need to situate her alongside her six homonymous predecessors, who played an extraordinary role in the Ptolemaic kingdom between 193 and 30 bce. The name Cleopatra was introduced into the Ptolemaic dynasty from outside, through a marriage of a daughter of the Seleucid king Antiochus III with Ptolemy V. But these seven Cleopatras managed to create a unique phenomenon in ancient history: the extension of the role of the queen from a royal consort into an important power broker or even sole ruler in successive generations. This is the first biography of all royal Cleopatras together, and it is quite remarkable how it succeeds in not turning the first six Cleopatras into a mere prelude to the last one, but manages to accord sufficient space and the proper context to all of them. In the process, the author offers a fascinating introduction to the last two centuries of Ptolemaic history in its wider Mediterranean setting, while also illuminating the particular circumstances that made possible this unique phenomenon of the intrusion of royal women into the male sphere of power over a series of generations.

Finally, Llewellyn-Jones’ book must be read alongside the volume edited by Patricia Eunji Kim and Anastasia Tchaplyghine on queens in antiquity.Footnote ²⁰ The nineteen chapters examine two major issues. The first issue is the methodologies and historiographies of studying queens in antiquity, discussing both the problems of dealing with ancient sources written by men, as well as the sexist stereotypes that have guided modern scholarship. The relevant essays range widely in terms of time and space: alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt, they also cover peripheral regions such as Ethiopia, Nubia, and Yemen, while also including one chapter on the emergence of the title of queen in the Greek world, and another on Cleopatra III. The second issue concerns the reception of ancient queens in contemporary literature and popular culture. The remarkable thing about this book is not the issue of modern reception, but rather the fact that many of these essays are written by, or in conversation with, contemporary artists and activists. Historians of antiquity will profit immensely from these imaginative recreations and the questions they raise, both about ancient realities as well as modern identities.